tl;dr:
  Me rambling and mostly figuring it out on my own, read at your own risk.

I often say VoidLinux has one big con:
  All other distros feel slow once you use Void.

It actually is a con for me at this point, because I'm looking for a "just 
works" distro.  The last time I tried to use Ubuntu, it was at least 100 
times slower than Void (and also rarely "just works").
Apt is slower during a normal update, than it takes fglrx to do it's 
thing.  In addition to all those problems, Ubuntu has a way of frustrating 
me as much as a set of headphones that have that broken wire that almost 
works if you twist it just right.

Are there any distros out there that have at least a fraction the speed 
Void does?  I'd like to have a distro on hand that has tons of packages so 
it's easier to test new programs I find out about that are not available on 
void.

The only distro I can think of that might match this requirement is Sabayon.

The only other distro that comes close, aside from Sabayon, is Arch LInux.


I'm actually looking into audio/video production, so any distros that are 
good for that, as well as being fast, is what I'm looking for.

xbps and runit spoil me.  I expect too much from my operating systems now.


Honestly, I'll probably just spin up Arch in a VM to test packages.  If I 
like the program, then I'll try to package it for Void.  Void is missing a 
lot of packages for the artist community.

Unrelated question:  How the hell does Void seemingly never break?  I've 
seen a couple issues over the time I've been with Void, but it all seems to 
get fixed without my intervention.  On Arch Linux, if I forget to update 
for a week, my system would crash if I tried to update.


Perhaps Gentoo would work out, just build a machine specifically for audio 
production and just never update it.

Anyway, I've pretty much answered myself here, but I'm going to post 
anyway.  Perhaps there is something I'm not seeing.